Re-gifting:

the Christmas tree burned
in a barrel
by six homeless men

who are feeding from
discarded party platters;

earlier, one crumpled up
discarded wrapping
collected from many recycling bins
to insulate the refrigerator box
he’ll sleep in.

A luxury car in a mortgaged driveway.
A sleeping family down the hall, up the stairs.

A shark’s head mounted on the den wall.
A fat ass in the leather desk chair.

A sandwich and a beer on the desk.
A porno on the computer screen.

A shift in his eyes.
A wriggle in the seat.

A possibility?
A way out?

A moment before the flickering scene passes.
A forearm wiped slowly across his damp mouth.

A second click.
A replay. 

To remove your clothing
in public
is dramatic, perhaps even brave
or useful; to put clothing back on
when one has been
publicly nude
is also dramatic, but
this is not usually done
for an audience, as most
prefer the end of mystery
to the resumption of mystery
and see the latter as deception;
when one resumes a deception
before the world,
those who became naked as afterthought
and did not participate
in the original drama will feel cold
and cheated.

All this is to say
that to decide to swim naked
in the main stream
ought usually to be a final choice.
One should not go backwards from there;
indeed, it is made nearly impossible
by the ever-judging audience.
They know you too well,
you see,
for any of them to not picture you
naked ever again.

Still, there are those
who do pull it off,
but it takes time and patience
to be among them,
and you must wait
for an entire generation to pass
before you can walk out clothed
as you wish again, out there
among your disowned heirs, the nude
public, in all their skin
and bare finery. 

No matter how wonderfully
you are arrayed,

it feels a little hollow
when you step out that way.

It’s a shuttered charm school
in here: a lot of ghosts learned
in the arts of restraint and poise,
but not much that’s still alive.

All I can taste is smoke
from the butt-end
of a burned heart.
It’s all I can do to stay inside.

If the door I used to come in
is still clear and still leads back
to clean air, I can’t see it.
I should have left a trail.

As it is, I’m stuck here, I guess,
learning to make sense of this;
drinking poison with my pinky raised,
choking on it with my lips sealed.

It’s all I can do to stay inside.
The whole damn place is still alive.
I should have left a trail; better still,
I should have left this sealed.

The simplest approach
to the remaking of the world is to
let go of the tug of war

between past and future
and let Now happen: unavoidably,
there will be pain.

Someone holding on too tightly will fall,
become bruised and filthy and angry.
Someone’s going to make a lot of noise.

It happens each time we do this,
and it doesn’t matter that it happens.
It has to be “we,” and it has to be “now.”

and there will always be tears.
Even if nothing’s being done.  Even if
it’s still the same old world as always,

there will be tears.  Trying to pretend
that no one ever cries is dishonest,
avoiding change to prevent crying

is being dishonest with ourselves.
We just have to let go the rope
and fall if we’re ever going to stand up again.

The rumpled
training manager from Grand Rapids
is clearly one sheet away from
three sheets to the wind when he blurts it out:

“I don’t care what you think
about the divinity angle — it’s
a heck of a story.  Think about it:
child bride, older man, infant
in a bed of straw, animals (there HAD
to have been animals, man, it was a
freaking stable), and then those kings
and the fancy gifts and the comet
in the sky above:  even if the angels
were a fabrication, the whole damn cosmic order
shows up in that little tale — and there’s death
and taxes, courtesy of Herod —
that’s a heck of a story, as if every element
from human royalty to the plant kingdom
(if you count the straw)
was in communion with the homeless
and the galaxy and the myrrh and all.”

He lifted the glass again,
poured the last of the bourbon
into himself.  “I get tickled
thinking about it.  I mean,
here you and I sit in an airport bar
like we’ve known each other forever,
brought together with all these other nomads
and there’s that bird stuck in the terminal rafters
and the lights on the runway like stars —
I think of the story
and I see it happening
all the time;
and all I have to do
to make it real
is look around wherever I find myself
and find out what’s being born.
I’m not saying
I believe it all happened that way,
of course; and I’m fine with you
believing whatever you want,
I’m just saying
it still keeps on being
a heck of a story,
no matter what you think
of the Virgin Birth part:
something to think about
while we sit here stranded
a long way from home.”

I don’t want to be here,
listening to this,
staring out the big windows
at huge, immobile planes.
I just want to be home.

I don’t want to know this guy
or think about the story
while billowing sheets of snow
scoot across the tarmac
reminding me
that even if there is a hotel room
out there, it’ll be sheer misery
getting to it;
I just want to be home.

But we’re here, the training manager
and the nice young couple with the baby in the corner booth
and all these other random folks,
and I’m here too, and while I’m not going
to take a census of us all,
I bet no one wants to be here right now
hearing this
so far from home.

He’s so loud,
so drunk and getting drunker,
and he smells of something sweet
and pungent, and he keeps talking
while home gets more and more distant
even as we’re sitting still.

I’m not going to tell you
there is any redemption here —

there’s just the story
and the telling
and the wish for the messenger
to keep it to himself
while I wonder about that sparrow
who can’t fly out of here
into the cold of the dark winter storm,
but who will evidently try
till he can try no more.

I am trying to get sleepy
but time is refusing to budge
from the track it’s on
and there are after all many hours of the day
we waste numbers on
considering how often most of us see them
I am trying to get sleepy
but the night’s flexing its muscles
showing me how strong it is
by holding me by the lapels
and not letting go
I am trying to get sleepy
without aid of alcohol or weed or heroin or death
and it’s a no go tonight for the straight man
who seems to be stubbornly awake and alive
when sleep is the most important task before him
I am trying to get sleepy
but the damn sheep are singing
at the top of their woolly lungs
I am trying to get sleepy
but the sirens outside
sing as well of other people who aren’t asleep either
it’s criminal how they torture me for their sleeplessness
arrest all the waking rascals
me too
I need to be imprisoned somewhere boring
with gray walls
and nothing to stimulate me
it’ll be like sleep
even if I’m awake
losing track
to time

The meteor never knew
how hope grew from the light
it gave to the watchers below,
or how they hung their wishes
upon it. 

It did not know
how alive it made those people feel,
how for a few seconds
they put aside their envy
of those around them
who seemed to have had all the luck
and told themselves they now had
a little of it themselves
because of what they’d seen.

Someone will no doubt say
this is an argument
against suicide, how you never know
who will be lit by your passage;

someone will be wrong,
someone will have missed the point
that awareness or lack thereof
would have changed nothing
for the meteor, which fell
into vapor according to the rules
which also gave the people below it
the light from the burning
and the hope is always
a secondary and unintended
effect.

Tags: poems, poetry, meditations

In an eclipse
of an eclipse (too many
clouds to see)

the sky may redden
above the cover and it may
seep through

I’ve never seen the sky
not change even when
the event was obscured

As above
so below
The event seeps through

Colors oddly burnt
onto the ground
as if all had been concussed

Shaken
into strange
shades — as above

so below
and inside
and overall

Cut me off
because I’m stupidly
long winded at times,
oversensitive, fat with a sense
of my own importance
and centered on the inner eye
of my personal storm.

Cut me off
because I’ve stopped caring
about how much I sound
like parents, like teachers,
like the people I hate to admit
live within.

Cut me off
even if I bleed because
that flow would be
the cleanest thing
to come out of me
in years.

Cut me off
and see what buds
from the scar if I heal.
It may be smaller but stronger.
It may be all the incentive
the healthy core of me needs
to get out there
into the sun
and live.

Let us all have one moment
of clarity for our pasts —
not the catastrophic moments,
not the Big Events, not the tragic
or comic or blissful climaxes
we usually hold close and call
“the past,”

but for the startling moments
when we see a person
in a new light, someone
we’d forgotten who comes back
and opens up school lockers
full of surprising good.

Let us praise unfamous people,
words that should have been recalled, statements
that should have been murmured
and branded and engraved
somewhere inside.

Let us open up.
Let us seize scraps
and set them in lockets.
Let us speak to the small
and the ordinary.

Let us learn that
pain and joy are not our province
alone.  Let us learn
that those we forgot
might have been allies
in the old battle of awkward
had we let them in back then,

and let us not keep them out
a moment longer
once they reenter the room.

Phone calls
from dear friends
buzz through
the line I’ve drawn
around time meant
to be alone, very alone
with the critical work.
Like bees
stinging through denim,
they itch me all over
though I know they’re only
reaching out to me
and reacting badly
when I swat them off.

I may never taste honey again,
but at least I’m completing
important things. So many,
many important things
I can’t remember them,

and there’s no one besides me
who knows of them all.